In recent years, cats have become the most popular house pet in many countries around the world. This is partly due to the fact that raising a cat indoors is in many ways easier than raising a dog, since a dog needs to be taken out several times a day for toilet use, whereas a cat can stay indoors permanently, using a litter box as a toilet. Hence, cat litter boxes have become a common feature in many residences around the world.
Broadly speaking, the cat litter box solutions offered today can be divided into three types. The first type includes simple, non-automatic litter boxes that require the use of a manual scooper to remove the cat waste. More advanced non-automatic litter boxes enable cleaning the cat litter without a need for direct manual scooping. The third type of cat litter boxes are automatic litter boxes that claim to clean the cat litter without any human interaction. While both non-automatic market segments offer litter boxes solutions that are more or less in the same price range, the automatic litter boxes solutions tend to be much more expensive and often require repeat purchasing of specific consumable materials, and thus may be viewed as a completely different market segment. The present invention relates to the two non-automatic market segments.
Typically, simple, non-automatic litter boxes come in two forms—open boxes and closed boxes. Both forms of boxes most often make use of replaceable litter material, granular material that reacts to the cat's feces and urine to form an aggregated lump, thus allowing the cat to dig in and deposit solid and liquid waste. In both cases, cleaning the cat litter is achieved using a scooping device which is manually driven throughout the base of the box in search for waste to extract. The main difference between these two forms of litter boxes is that while the open form allows smells and litter particles to freely escape to the surrounding environment, the closed one reduces such effects.
Simple, non-automatic litter boxes are popular due to the fact that they are cheap to purchase and simple to operate. However, these litter boxes suffer from some major disadvantages. The main disadvantage of prior art, non-automatic litter boxes, is that they need to be thoroughly scooped, manually, in search for waste, a time consuming, messy and smelly process. Moreover, in the blind search for waste in the granular material, the scooping device often causes clumped litter aggregates to break down and fall apart, which both makes it harder to scoop them out, and releases even more foul odors into the immediate environment. Another major disadvantage of prior art, non-automatic litter boxes, is that they offer no solution to the problem of litter sticking to the cat's paws. Typically, a cat leaving the litter box has litter particles stuck to its paws, and unless the litter particles are removed as the cat exits the litter box, these particles tend to scatter throughout the surrounding environment (“tracking”), causing major inconvenience to the cat owner. In fact, the above disadvantages are the main reason many consumers search for other solutions to the task of cleaning the cat's waste.
In order to overcome the aforementioned disadvantages, more advanced non-automatic litter boxes were developed to facilitate the cleaning of waste without the need for manual scooping, thus minimizing direct interaction of the cat owner with the cat's waste, as well as reducing the breakage of waste aggregates during the cleaning process, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,742,476, 5,507,252 and 5,598,810. Similarly, other litter boxes were introduced into the market with the aim of tackling the problem of litter spillage and tracking (design patent D463887). However, each one of these products has its own unique disadvantages (some require vast physical space to operate, some collect the litter waste into a large tray that is difficult to empty into a small form plastic bag), and none of these products combine these two important features (no need for manual scooping, cleaning cat's paws) into one working solution.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for and it would be advantageous to have a non-automatic litter box that does not require manual scooping of the cat litter, facilitates cleaning the cat's paws from left over granular material, and allows the removed granular material to be recycled and reused.